Lisa Hirmer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work, in one way or another, is about the collective nature of being—the parts of life that can only exist between things. Spanning photography, sculpture, installation, social practice, community collaboration and sometimes writing, her work explores collective relationships both within human communities and between humans and the more-than-human-world (which is to say other species as well as planetary forces like water, wind, geology, and so on).
Her work has explored the public life of ideas, the entangled connections between humans and the complex ecologies they are a part of, the way futures are built collectively, the movement of matter between bodies, and the slow work of ecological repair. Much of her recent work wrestles with the implications of climate change, aiming to make sense of what it means to be living and working inside a planet-wide emergency that threatens the ecological fabric of our world(s). A key part of this work is complicating ideas about humanity with a more expansive sense of planetary being: an embodied consciousnesses that is a deeply connected part of a planetary whole.
Hirmer’s practice is unapologetically sincere, often collaborative, usually site-specific, and always deeply connected to the places, ecologies and communities that surround its creation. Her work finds home in traditional gallery contexts, as well as an expanded field of other public and semi-public spaces, where she experiments with how art can operate in the public realm. Though her mixed Mexican and European Canadian background is not a topic of her work per se, it it influences all parts of her practice, infusing it with a deep-felt awareness that multiple worlds exist alongside one another.
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Her work has be shown in galleries across Canada and internationally including at Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, Cambridge Galleries, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Tom Thompson Gallery, Fondation Grantham, Harbourfront Centre, KIAC, Peninsula Arts, CAFKA, Third Space, Queens Museum, and Flux Factory, among others.
Recent highlights for her practice include the travelling solo exhibition Everything We Have Done is Weather Now curated by Josephine Mills at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery; an ongoing artist-made garden for nocturnal pollinators in collaboration with Christina Kingsbury called Moth Garden; and a public art installation for the City of Barrie as part of Seeds to Sow curated by Katie Lawson. She is an ongoing thread residency artist with Towards Braiding, a program led by Elwood Jimmy working towards decolonial processes and sensibilities and was the 2022 artist in residence with Waterfront Toronto. Her book of poetry, Forests Not Yet Here, which emerges from texts written for participatory works, was published by Publication Studio Guelph in 2020.
She has also done artist residencies with Arts House Melbourne (TimePlaceSpace: Nomad), the Santa Fe Art Institute (Water Rights), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (Rising Waters), the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (Soil Cultures), BIGCI, KIAC (Natural + Manufactured) and the Camargo Foundation. She has received grants and support from the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, musagetes and the Culture and Animals Foundation. She has a Masters of Architecture and Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo and is currently based in Ontario, Canada. From 2009 until 2017 she created public work, both collaboratively and solo, under the pseudonym DodoLab. An archive of that work can be found here.
With grateful acknowledgment of funding support from:
